"When I talk about heart-healthy diets, my first words are not, 'Have a glass of wine,'" said Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, director of the women and heart disease program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. She says she has been known to recommend having a glass of wine with dinner, but "we can certainly get the health benefits from other places and other foods."

Science 101: It isn't real until it's been independently reproduced. That's practically the definition of science. Nobody except other researchers should be hearing about this crap until it's been confirmed, but controversial-sounding research generates page-hits, and many journalists are just whores.

Mouth an throat cancer for men. I wonder if they check hard liquor vs soft. Also, ethanol helps carry tobacco specific nitrosamines across epithelial cells, so I wonder if they corrected for smokers who drink while smoking. Something seems off....

They simply dont know. I had a cardiologist at the gym admit to us in a presentation that they dont *KNOW* that cholesterol is actually bad for you. They look at studies and come up with the best guess based on the mountain of (often conflicting) data.

They simply never know. Its why eggs are good then bad then good then bad then good then...

amquelbettamin:Mouth an throat cancer for men. I wonder if they check hard liquor vs soft. Also, ethanol helps carry tobacco specific nitrosamines across epithelial cells, so I wonder if they corrected for smokers who drink while smoking. Something seems off....

Beowoolfie:Science 101: It isn't real until it's been independently reproduced. That's practically the definition of science. Nobody except other researchers should be hearing about this crap until it's been confirmed, but controversial-sounding research generates page-hits, and many journalists are just whores.

So, does this mean we'll start seeing less beer commercials? Will booze ads vanish from professional sports? Will a warning be required with every bottle and case of booze? Will people on the street insult you if you smell of beer -- like they do tobacco users?

So, are there dangers of second hand booze fumes? When will they quadruple the OTC cost of a 40? Are the lawyers assembling their forces to start suing the booze industry?

So, booze doesn't make you popular, pretty, handsome, sexy or fun after all? Isn't that false advertising? How long before hotels, motels and homes are advertised as 'non-drinking'?

Will the Samuel Adams beer commercials, where the guys wax nearly poetic over their brewing and get all misty eyed over the right hoppes to select, be ended?

Actually, booze is about as deadly in the long run as tobacco, especially in the secondary effects incidents. Drunk driver plowing into a car and sending that car into someone else's living room, injuring folks watching TV.

Booze is technically an organic poison which can be beneficial or harmful depending on the dosage. One of it's main uses was to preserve organic specimens. (They used to ship bodies back from the civil war packed in barrels of alcohol since it could take days or weeks to get them home. Some enterprising fellows, shocked at having to pour all of that used alcohol out after the body was removed, actually sold it to consumers and bars for drinking.)

Personally, I don't figure a drink or two a day can hurt you. Especially beer.

Take away the tobacco and the booze and everything else will still cause cancer. In most major cities, just stepping outside exposes you to far more toxins in the air than a cigarette does.

If I knew without a doubt that suffering a all-vegetarian, alcohol-abstaining lifestyle would allow me to live to 110, vs. my current omnivorous & moderate drinking one ( which may put me in my grave at 75), I still wouldn't change a thing...

Rik01:Personally, I don't figure a drink or two a day can hurt you. Especially beer.

I dunno, what are you basing that on? What constitutes harm? What is acceptable or negligible risk? Why "especially beer"? Personally I'd wager that wine is better for you, owing to higher phenol levels and fewer carbohydrates.

The thing is, nearly everything hurts you in some way, even if it helps or is benign in other ways. But the point of this sort of research isn't to say definitively that 'X is "bad" ' or not, it's just to give an idea of how risky something is. They will never be able to say that drinking X amount WILL cause cancer / heart disease / whatever. In most cases they won't even be able to tell people who DO get cancer that it was necessarily from drinking. They can just tell you that people who drink X amount have, on average, Y% higher chance of getting cancer. If you continue to drink like a fish and never have health problems related to it then it doesn't mean that they were wrong, or that drinking didn't have the potential to be harmful, it just means that you took your risks and ended up on one side of the statistics.

Rik01:In most major cities, just stepping outside exposes you to far more toxins in the air than a cigarette does.

[Citation Needed]

/Actually no it isn't, that's just pure bullsh*t. That's maybe true in China.

Forbidden Doughnut:If I knew without a doubt that suffering a all-vegetarian, alcohol-abstaining lifestyle would allow me to live to 110, vs. my current omnivorous & moderate drinking one ( which may put me in my grave at 75), I still wouldn't change a thing...

Time for another Twain quote...

SLC: There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and ever eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.